Hello Pals, greeting from Ghana, I am currently working on an evoucher system for a restaurant with 4 branches. The concept of the system is that, vouches with unique pin numbers will printed and sold to customer who can then use at any of the 4 branches therefore to get the system working properly there should be a centralized database where all the branches will retrieve data from and here lies my the problem. I want a secured way to link all systems at the 4 branches to one database. I seriously need your suggestions. my programming in JAVA and my database is Mysql .Thanks in advance

Why don't you develop an Api layer instead of connecting directly to the database.

Pls these my first project in networked applications. some pls help me some api layer example links and code or details explanation. Thank for you

ikequan: Pls these my first project in networked applications. some pls help me some api layer example links and code or details explanation. Thank for you

A web based api. Example is facebook, twitter api. Infact almost all websites have it.
To make it easier for you, you just develop a REST api, pass in the voucher code as a GET or POST variable, and return a response such as VALID, INVALID, USED etc.

Another good thing here is that you can even integrate the api in other peoples' website without the need of giving them your database access credentials, which is a security risk.

Check out how bulk sms website api works. It is the simplest form of the REST api

I agree with Spikec. You need to learn more on web-services concepts - Publishing and consuming a RESTFUL or SOAP webservices. But I prefer RESTFUL and you will need the knowledge of json or xml to do these.

ok Thanks very much. i did some research on google and cam across some rest api in php...now my problem is consuming the php web service in java. Can pls share code example with me.

I don't know java

But basically, use curl

ikequan:
Pls these my first project in networked applications. some pls help me some api layer example links and code or details explanation. Thank for you

how did u convince them to hand u a major job like for which u are inexperienced?

asalimpo:
how did u convince them to hand u a major job like for which u are inexperienced?

Forget about inexperience bro. At no point can you acquire all experience in any field.

@Ikequan, Is your "rest api in php" publishing json or xml?

It is publishing in json

Sorry for my late response, I was on long journey to so somewhere. However, the steps here is
-query the api using Http connections stuff and get your response from such api
-Take the return InputStream or text
-Collect them as Collection. Preferably Hashtable.
-Then you can reference each layer(dept) of the json data using the Hashtable key.

Look like I'm speaking Hausa? Then send me the sample api, the data you want me to extract(consume) from it, so I can send you a source

Should in case you wana publish a json then you will need libraries that does that in java. Check out https://code.google.com/p/google-gson and the guide there too.

@olyjosh sorry for late reply i was also on a long journey from Accra to Kumasi(all in Ghana). i really appreciate your concern, will research around your answer. Thank you very much.